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I noted earlier that the year of 2013 had an unexpectedly light hurricane season. The reason was some unusually high temperatures in the Sahara. That may sound contradictory but the increased heat there made for unusually strong desert dust storms the blew all the way across the Atlantic. They were so big and dense that they showed up on satellite photos. Traces of that Sahara dust were found as far west as the central states of the USA and colored the clouds over the states near the Canadian border. That enormous dust storm blocked some of the sun on the Atlantic Ocean and reduced the rate of heat gain and evaporation that generates hurricanes.
2013 also had an unusually lower polar ice melt than preceding years and much less than anticipated for the year. Could this again be due to the global warming of the Sahara that raised major dust storms that blocked out some of the sun’s fierceness and reduced the storms that might have driven more warm air to the polar regions?
Those Sahara dust storms may be a means where nature plays some part in mitigating the season’s hurricanes, but is the enormous pollution that comes along with them really a positive solution to the problem?
The sun is the source of the power but it is the evaporation from the oceans that caries that power along in the low pressure storm systems moving from place to place. The turbulence of the tons of water rising through the atmosphere brings the winds that move the weather. Hurricanes die out over land or colder water.
The illustration below is a simple sketch from a NOOA flier on how the Atlantic hurricanes grow and move westward.
THE SOLUTION
An old proverb says “To solve your future problems, you must make your enemy’s children your friends”. Lets look to where the storms are born as babies, for a solution to stop them before they ever get started.
There is no man-made structure that can hold back the furious rage of weather storms driven by the power of the sun. Even though a thousand ‘consultants’ will say ‘yes’ to your every question, and then charge for the extended unforeseen contingencies. Once the sun’s energy has been put into motion, that power is beyond any solution devised by mankind.
Rather than trying to stop the energy of those enormous storms or to defuse that energy to some harmless end result, the answer is to stop the gigantic energy of the tropical sun from ever building the mobile energy force that sends a devastating storm to the USA.
It’s not a quick and easy solution, but rather a practical and doable solution that can be done in increments by any and all interested parties.
Quite simply - plant a forest that covers the Sahara Desert and ideally all of North Africa.
Given that the size of the North African desert area is larger than the continental USA, it might seem to be an insurmountable task to plant a forest in the desert. In the two hundred year history of the USA, the land has been transformed in a great number of ways and in a much shorter time the US population has shifted from the productive plains to the coastal areas. It is not an instant fix and will take some time. However, if you break the problem down to workable units, a man can eat an elephant in bite-sized pieces.
The reason that north Africa is a desert and not a tropical forest is that in spite of the abundant sunshine, there is not currently any significant water to allow for plant growth the can make productive use of the immense amount of solar energy falling on the ground. The southern part of the continent of Africa has the Atlantic to the west and the Indian Ocean to the east to bring moisture from winds blowing either direction. But northern Africa has its weather coming from the vast continent of Asia’s vast desert regions.
There are geological signs of ancient major rivers flowing and petroglyphs showing jungle animals that someone saw there a long time ago. There are still some small areas with small amounts of rainfall and groundwater as shown at the red spot near the top of the first composite image. At that location, about 70 miles from the coast and at an elevation of 500 feet, a small watercourse flows from the hills to water some fields a quarter of a mile wide and a mile long before it disappears into the desert sand.
While the land may appear barren now, one advantage of the long period of not growing anything, is that there has been little plant growth to draw nutrients from the soil. The slow natural breakdown of minerals has had no plants to draw it out or any major rainfall to wash it away. With just the right amount of water the desert could burst into bloom again. It has happened over many miles of what was barren desert in the southwestern states of the USA where dams and canals brought water from the mountains to irrigate thousands of acres of lush crops.
So where might the proposed huge amount of new water for the Sahara come from?
There is the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west and south and the Red Sea to the east. It is salt water and a long way from the center of the Sahara. Now the question changes to methods of transportation and desalination, two readily workable procedures
MITIGATION MEASURES
Tied into this issue is that global governments recognize that their industrial production regularly produces toxic or polluting elements and that there may be a price to be paid to mitigate those problems. To do the mitigation at the site of the production plant may require a total destruction of the plant and a reconstruction cost that is more than the productive business can survive. The USA is all ready using the “Cap and Trade” policy of allowing a polluting production plant to continue in operation by ‘buying’ clean air credits in some other means. In California, polluting industries that can’t be cleaned up without a reconstruction of the entire plant, can pay to buy up older ‘gross polluting’ cars and get the equivalent amount of air pollution reduction.
Lets take that idea to a higher level and think globally. If entire nations can direct funding from their polluting industries to a worldwide program of cleaner air, it doesn’t take too much arm-twisting to have those ‘Cap and Trade’ funds directed to improving other parts of the world, like North Africa. The fines or penalties of polluting industries can be directed to companies that can devise and produce wind driven pumps and solar powered distillation devices to bring salt water from the four sides of North Africa, inland to the barren areas where some of the barren land can be used to collect the solar energy to distill the water, and the surrounding areas with better soil can become productive with the use of the new fresh water source.
To begin testing to perfect the process, a preferred site would have a high hill near a shoreline where windmill ‘farms’ would pump seawater up the hills to storage reservoirs. The water then flows by gravity to the next reservoir at a farther inland location and slightly lower elevation than the first windmill pump.
More windmill ‘farms’ would again pump the water to another higher reservoir. A big plus is that much of the area of the Sahara desert is less than 1,000 above sea level. The image below shows that although there are a few higher interior mountains, much of the area near the coastlines and even at times very far inland, is simply barren low desert. As such there are no high barriers to need huge pumps such as the Edmonston Pumping Plant where water is pumped 1,926 ft up over the Tehachapi mountain pass to bring northern California water to southern California.
OPERATIONS STAFF
Obviously there will be some need to operate, maintain and
